The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (20 page)

30             His black bulk darkening the day,

With a voice cruel and flat,

‘Cat!…Cat!…Cat!…' he said, ‘Cat!…Cat!…'

When I'm shot through heart and head,

And there's no choice but to die,

The last word I'll hear, no doubt,

Won't be ‘Charge!' or ‘Bomb them out!'

Nor the stretcher-bearer's cry,

‘Let that body be, he's dead!'

But a voice cruel and flat

40             Saying for ever, ‘Cat!…Cat!…Cat!'

Robert Graves

Mental Cases

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?

Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,

Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,

Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked?

Stroke on stroke of pain, – but what slow panic,

Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?

Ever from their hair and through their hand palms

Misery swelters. Surely we have perished

Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

10             – These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.

Memory fingers in their hair of murders,

Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.

Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,

Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.

Always they must see these things and hear them,

Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,

Carnage incomparable and human squander

Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.

Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented

20             Back into their brains, because on their sense

Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;

Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh

– Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,

Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.

– Thus their hands are plucking at each other;

Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;

Snatching after us who smote them, brother,

Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.

Wilfred Owen

The Death-Bed

He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped

Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls;

Aqueous like floating rays of amber light,

Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep, –

Silence and safety; and his mortal shore

Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death.

Someone was holding water to his mouth.

He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped

Through crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot

10             The opiate throb and ache that was his wound.

Water – calm, sliding green above the weir;

Water – a sky-lit alley for his boat,

Bird-voiced, and bordered with reflected flowers

And shaken hues of summer: drifting down,

He dipped contented oars, and sighed, and slept.

Night, with a gust of wind, was in the ward,

Blowing the curtain to a glimmering curve.

Night. He was blind; he could not see the stars

Glinting among the wraiths of wandering cloud;

20             Queer blots of colour, purple, scarlet, green,

Flickered and faded in his drowning eyes.

Rain; he could hear it rustling through the dark;

Fragrance and passionless music woven as one;

Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers

That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps

Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace

Gently and slowly washing life away.

                                                            *

He stirred, shifting his body; then the pain

Leaped like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore

30             His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs.

But someone was beside him; soon he lay

Shuddering because that evil thing had passed.

And death, who'd stepped toward him, paused and stared.

Light many lamps and gather round his bed.

Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.

Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.

He's young; he hated war; how should he die

When cruel old campaigners win safe through?

But Death replied: ‘I choose him.' So he went,

40             And there was silence in the summer night;

Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.

Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.

Siegfried Sassoon

‘
When this bloody war is over
'

When this bloody war is over,

No more soldiering for me.

When I get my civvy clothes on,

Oh, how happy I shall be!

No more church parades on Sunday,

No more begging for a pass.

You can tell the Sergeant-Major

To stick his passes up his arse.

When this bloody war is over,

10             No more soldiering for me.

When I get my civvy clothes on,

Oh, how happy I shall be!

No more NCOs to curse me,

No more rotten army stew.

You can tell the old Cook-Sergeant,

To stick his stew right up his flue.

When this bloody war is over,

No more soldiering for me.

When I get my civvy clothes on,

20                    Oh, how happy I shall be!

No more sergeants bawling

‘Pick it up' and ‘Put it down.'

If I meet the ugly bastard

I'll kick his arse all over town.

Soldiers' song

Preparations for Victory

My soul, dread not the pestilence that hags

The valley; flinch not you, my body young,

At these great shouting smokes and snarling jags

Of fiery iron; the dice may not be flung

As yet that claims you. Manly move among

These ruins, and what you must do, do well;

Look, here are gardens, there mossed boughs are hung

With apples whose bright cheeks none might excel,

And there's a house as yet unshattered by a shell.

10             ‘I'll do my best,' the soul makes sad reply,

‘And I will mark the yet unmurdered tree,

The relics of dear homes that court the eye,

And yet I see them not as I would see.

Hovering between, a ghostly enemy.

Sickens the light, and poisoned, withered, wan,

The least defiled turns desperate to me.'

The body, poor unpitied Caliban,

Parches and sweats and grunts to win the name of Man.

Hours, days, eternities like swelling waves

20             Pass on, and still we drudge in this dark maze,

The bombs and coils and cans by strings of slaves

Are borne to serve the coming day of days;

Gray sleep in slimy cellars scarce allays

With its brief blank the burden. Look, we lose;

The sky is gone, the lightless, drenching haze

Of rainstorm chills the bone; earth, air are foes,

The black fiend leaps brick-red as life's last picture goes.

Edmund Blunden

‘
Après la guerre finie
'

Après la guerre finie,

Soldat anglais parti;

Mam'selle Fransay boko pleuray

Après la guerre finie.

Après la guerre finie,

Soldat anglais parti;

Mademoiselle in the family way,

Après la guerre finie.

Après la guerre finie,

10             Soldat anglais parti;

Mademoiselle can go to hell

Après la guerre finie.

Soldiers' song

Everyone Sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away…O, but Everyone

10             Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Siegfried Sassoon

Peace Celebration

Now we can say of those who died unsung,

Unwept for, torn, ‘Thank God they were not blind

Or mad! They've perished strong and young,

Missing the misery we elders find

In missing them.' With such a platitude

We try to cheer ourselves. And for each life

Laid down for us, with duty well-imbued,

With song-on-lip, in splendid soldier strife –

For sailors, too, who willingly were sunk –

10             We'll shout ‘Hooray!' –

And get a little drunk.

Osbert Sitwell

Paris, November 11, 1918

Down the boulevards the crowds went by,

The shouting and the singing died away,

And in the quiet we rose to drink the toasts,

Our hearts uplifted to the hour, the Day:

The King – the Army – Navy – the Allies –

England – and Victory. –

And then you turned to me and with low voice

(The tables were abuzz with revelry),

‘I have a toast for you and me', you said,

10             And whispered ‘Absent', and we drank

Our unforgotten Dead.

     
But I saw Love go lonely down the years,

     
And when I drank, the wine was salt with tears.

May Wedderburn Cannan

It Is Near Toussaints

It is near Toussaints, the living and dead will say:

‘Have they ended it? What has happened to Gurney?'

And along the leaf-strewed roads of France many brown shades

Will go, recalling singing, and a comrade for whom also they

Had hoped well. His honour them had happier made.

Curse all that hates good. When I spoke of my breaking

(Not understood) in London, they imagined of the taking

Vengeance, and seeing things were different in future.

(A musician was a cheap, honourable and nice creature.)

10             Kept sympathetic silence; heard their packs creaking

And burst into song – Hilaire Belloc was all our Master.

On the night of the dead, they will remember me,

Pray Michael, Nicholas, Maries lost in Novembery

River-mist in the old City of our dear love, and batter

At doors about the farms crying ‘Our war poet is lost

Madame
–
no bon
!' – and cry his two names, warningly, sombrely.

Ivor Gurney

Two Fusiliers

And have we done with War at last?

Well, we've been lucky devils both,

And there's no need of pledge or oath

To bind our lovely friendship fast,

By firmer stuff

Close bound enough.

By wire and wood and stake we're bound,

By Fricourt and by Festubert,

By whipping rain, by the sun's glare,

10             By all the misery and loud sound,

By a Spring day,

By Picard clay.

Show me the two so closely bound

As we, by the wet bond of blood,

By friendship, blossoming from mud,

By Death: we faced him, and we found

Beauty in Death,

In dead men breath.

Robert Graves

Report on Experience

I have been young, and now am not too old;

And I have seen the righteous forsaken,

His health, his honour and his quality taken.

This is not what we were formerly told.

I have seen a green country, useful to the race,

Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished,

Even the last rat and last kestrel banished –

God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.

I knew Seraphina; Nature gave her hue,

10             Glance, sympathy, note, like one from Eden.

I saw her smile warp, heard her lyric deaden;

She turned to harlotry; – this I took to be new.

Say what you will, our God sees how they run.

These disillusions are His curious proving

That He loves humanity and will go on loving;

Over there are faith, life, virtue in the sun.

Edmund Blunden

Dead and Buried

I have borne my cross through Flanders,

Through the broken heart of France,

I have borne it through the deserts of the East;

I have wandered, faint and longing,

Through the human hosts that, thronging,

Swarmed to glut their grinning idols with a feast.

I was crucified in Cambrai,

And again outside Bapaume;

I was scourged for miles along the Albert Road,

10                 I was driven, pierced and bleeding,

With a million maggots feeding

On the body that I carried as my load.

I have craved a cup of water,

Just a drop to quench my thirst,

As the routed armies ran to keep the pace;

But no soldier made reply

As the maddened hosts swept by,

And a sweating straggler kicked me in the face.

There's no ecstasy of torture

20                 That the devils e'er devised,

That my soul has not endured unto the last;

As I bore my cross of sorrow,

For the glory of to-morrow,

Through the wilderness of battles that is past.

Yet my heart was still unbroken,